Good Help is Hard to Find

"Hello. This is FEMA Director Mike Brown. Thank you for calling the federal government's disaster hotline. I'm sorry I'm not available at this time, but your call is very important to me. Please make a selection from the following menu and your call will be forwarded to the next available bureaucrat. If you are the incompetent mayor of a city unprepared for a hurricane or flood, and you can't read your city's evacuation plan, please press '1'... If you are the addle-brained governor of a state experiencing a total breakdown of the social order and you don't know how to activate the National Guard troops under your command, please press '2'... If you are a U.S. senator seeking political cover, a scapegoat, a pile of money or a symbolic public apology for a natural disaster, please press '3'... If you are an ordinary citizen experiencing starvation, thirst, violent assault or any imminent catastrophe associated with an ongoing or recent disaster, you're shit-outta-luck. If I were you, I'd head to the nearest Wal-Mart. Thank you, and have a nice day.".... Remember the good old days? Before global warming? When wacky weather never killed people? When we had a President who cared about black people and there was no poverty? Remember when the government was full of competent professionals who took care of us and FEMA ran like a fine Swiss watch? It wasn't that long ago. Let's go back to Jesse Jackson's Chicago in July of 1995. In a span of five sizzling days, 738 mostly-black, mostly-elderly, mostly-poor citizens of Chicago's worst neighborhoods died of heat-related causes because they couldn't afford air-conditioning, couldn't afford the electricity to run their air-conditioners or because they were afraid to open their windows and doors at night for fear of crime. Chicago's Democratic crime machine lost hundreds of supporters (many were buried in mass graves but continue to vote regularly to this day) because 1. they couldn't or wouldn't take responsibility for their own safety; 2. Mayor Daley's plantation is a dangerous place even in mild weather; and 3. the man known as "The First Black President of the United States" was too busy playing hide-the-Cohiba with a portly intern to bother providing some air-conditioners and electricity for the people who put him in the office with the girl under the desk.... Where did Karl Rove hide 9,210 bodies? Howard Dean thinks Karl is harvesting organs for sale on the black market. Why? The death toll from all of Katrina is 790 at this writing... not the 10,000 victims originally-projected for New Orleans alone. And for that we're glad. It could have been much worse, but probably not much better. At the end of the day, we got some surprising help from other countries. But on the ground, it was America's military, private businesses, citizen volunteers and many religious groups that have been the silver lining on this cloud. Not the nanny-state at any level. And that's something you won't read about in The New York Times.... Packing Heat in New Orleans. Actor and Saddam Hussein apologist Sean Penn was so moved by the images of suffering and destruction in Katrina's wake that he immediately flew to New Orleans with a publicist and a photographer in order to be seen doing something even more positive than beating ex-wife Madonna and forcing her head into an oven. (Has anyone checked in on Robin Wright lately?) Penn, featured in The New York Post patrolling the puddles of New Orleans armed with a pump action shotgun, recovered one bloated body that turned out to be fellow filmmaker Michael Moore. Moore was in town working on his latest documentary Bush Killed Everyone Again. The pair had a good laugh and made plans for lunch at The Ivy in Beverly Hills next week. The death toll from Penn's visit has not been released.... In a league of his own on many levels, current Miami Heat and former Louisiana State University basketball star, Shaquille O'Neal was moved by the same images that Sean saw. His roots in the region compelled him to view the damage up close with his own eyes... so he went to New Orleans, too. After two days, he called neither the government nor Penn's photographer. Instead Shaq returned to Miami intent upon doing more for the victims than simply writing a check. Within a week, he and his wife had leased a fleet of 18-wheelers and rallied the Miami community to fill a huge warehouse with donations of everything from refrigerators and furniture to diapers, clothes and 10,000 cases of water. He and his family worked shoulder-to-shoulder in the hot sun with other volunteers to manually load every item into the trailers for shipment to the affected areas. And he's writing checks, too. In addition to the trucks, Shaq has pre-paid the rent on 400 apartments in Dallas for displaced families and is in the process of furnishing them. Why, Shaq? "Because I was raised that way." Big man, indeed....Check out those boobs that we hire and re-hire every election day (some for generations) and you have most of the answer to why "the government" doesn't work in the event of an emergency. Media hysterics and politics aside, the federal response to Katrina was about as timely and as flawed as anyone should expect from a fat, big, dumb and slow bureaucracy overseen by career politicians and populated with civil servants and other slackers who can't be canned for doing a lousy job. We have the government we deserve. We hired 'em and they could and should be a lot better at many things. But "first response" is not one of them. Unless you need to call in an airstrike on a local Wahabbi mosque, the federal government will never be your best first call in any emergency.